Monthly Archives: February 2011

Saturday Night at the Movies: “Oliver Twist”

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B42QACAQVIM&feature=related

Charles Dickens’s birthday passed the other day, so here’s the classic 1948 film version of Oliver Twist, with Alec Guinness as Fagin.

From The Secular Scripture:

There are said to be customs and rituals in ancient Greece that explain the child-exposing convention; but they do not explain why Victorian writers, fifteen centuries later, should be as preoccupied with it as ever.  With the archetype, at least: the actual exposure and adoption procedure is found only in stories with a strong folk tale feeling about them, like Silas Marner.  Scott and Dickens would often be helpless for plot interest without the motif of mysterious birth: in Dickens a hero’s parents, like those of Oliver Twist, may be triumphantly produced at the end of the story even though they were mere names, playing no part in the story itself.  (CW 18, 67)

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Immanuel Kant

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Immanuel Kant died on this date in 1804 (born 1724).

From The Double Vision:

The greatest of all philosophers who took criticism as his base of operations, Kant, examined three aspects of the critical faculty.  First was pure reason, which contemplates the objective world withing the framework of its own categories, and hence see the objective counterpart of itself, the world as it may really be eluding the categories.  Second was practical reason, where a conscious being is assumed to be a conscious will, and penetrates farther into the kind of reality we call existential, even into experience relating to God.  Third was the aesthetic faculty dealing with the environment within the categories of beauty, a critical operation involving, for Kant, questions of the kind we have just called teleological, relating to purpose and ultimate design.

For Kant, however, the formula of beauty in the natural world at least was “purposiveness without purpose.” The crystallizing of snowflakes is beautiful because it suggests design and intention and yet eludes these things.  To suggest that the design of a snowflake has been produced by a designer, whether Nature or God, suggests also that somebody or something has worked to produce it: such a suggestion limits it beauty by cutting of the sense of a spontaneous bursting into symmetry.  “Fire delights in form,” says Blake, and Wallace Stevens adds that we trust the world only when we have no sense of a concealed creator.  (CW 4, 191)

Islamic Republic of Iran

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_0SpjmRAfU

The Shah leaves Iran on February 11th 1979

On this date in 1979 the Iranian revolution established a theocracy under the supreme leadership of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini.

From one of the late notebooks:

History redeems: there’s a process within history that isn’t at all what Marxism calls the historical process, but relates to the cultural tradition.  People denounced or martyred as horrible heretics in the hysteria of their times later become objects of great cultural interest.  The twenty-first century will find The Satanic Verses a document of great interest to scholars and critics, but the Ayatollah will be of no interest to anybody except as one more nightmare of bigotry that history has produced in such profusion.  One would hope that eventually the stupid human race would get the point.  God doesn’t create post-mortem hells even for people devoting their lives to cruelty and tyranny, but if he did the Ayatollah would certainly be howling in one of them forever.  (CW 6, 644)

Egypt

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Cairo, today

Probably anybody who’s interested at all is fully up to date on developments in Egypt — Mubarak may be out tonight, and there’s talk of a quiet, behind the scenes military coup sympathetic to the will of the people.  It’s very gratifying that this popular uprising was not extinguished like the one in Iran.  But, of course, it does raise the issue of what comes next, and here perhaps is where our real fretting begins.  We hope for the best for the Egyptian people, whose courage this last week especially has seemed almost superhuman.  And this kind of thing is certainly consistent with Frye’s vision of revolution informed by primary concern.  We can, occasionally, do what needs to be done in the name of the things that are otherwise least likely to be named.  But, as Frye wryly notes in The Double Vision, “Hope springs eternal, unfortunately it usually springs prematurely.”  Vigilance matters now.  From this point on, merely hoping won’t make it so.

(Photo from The Hindu)

Carol Mavor at the Centre for Comparative Literature

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The Centre for Comparative Literature is proud to present two lectures by Northrop Frye Professor in Comparative Literature for 2010-2011, Carol Mavor: Wednesday March 9 and Thursday March 10, 5:30, Jackman Humanities 100.

Carol Mavor is Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at the University of Manchester, England. Mavor is the author of four books: Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott (Duke UP, 2007), Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess, Hawarden (Duke UP, 1999), and Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (Duke UP, 1995) and Black and Blue: The Bruising of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans soleil and Hiroshima mon amour, is forthcoming from Duke UP (2011). Her essays have appeared in Cabinet Magazine, Art History, Photography and Culture, Photographies, as well as edited volumes, including Geoffrey Batchen’s Photography Degree Zero and Mary Sheriff’s Cultural Contact and the Making of European Art. Her most recent published essay is on the French child-poet Minou Drouet.

Mavor’s writing has been widely reviewed in publications in the U.S. and U.K., including the Times Literary Supplement, the Los Angeles Times, and The Village Voice. She has lectured broadly in the US and the UK, including The Photographers’ Gallery (London), University of Cambridge, Duke University and the Royal College of Art.  For 2010-2011, Mavor was named the Northrop Frye Chair in Literary Theory at University of Toronto. Currently, Mavor is completing Blue Mythologies: A Study of the Hue of Blue (forthcoming from Reaktion in 2012).

Blue Mythologies is a visual, literary and cultural study of the color blue. Blue is a particularly duplicitous colour. For example, blue is often associated with opposites or near opposites: like joy and depression; or the sea and the sky; or infinite life and death. Mavor’s approach is semiological, as prescribed by Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (1953). “Mythology,” because it is truth disguised as fiction and fiction disguised as truth, is, by definition, as duplicitous as blue. The subjects are mostly Anglo-European and include a full range of blues: Chantal Akerman’s 2000 film  La Captive; the Aran islands off the coast of Western Ireland; cyanotypes and blue Polaroids; the Australian Satin Bowerbrid; Agnes Varda’s 1965 film  Le Bonheur; Roger Hiorns Seizure, the 2006 installation of copper-sulfite crystals grown to cover an entire London bed-sit; Krzysztof Kieslowski’s 1993 film Blue;  Werther’s Goethe (1774), Novalis’s Henry von Ofterdingen (ca. 1799-80) and Bernardin’s Paul et Virginia (1787). Nevertheless, the research includes blue in non-Western contexts: for example, Krishna’s blue skin in eighteenth-century Jodhpur painting or the powder-blue burqas in Samira Makhmalbaf’s 2003 film, At Five in the Afternoon.

Frye Alert

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Lynn Beavis, the director of the Richmond Art Gallery, cites Frye’s “Academy Without Walls” in a recent column in the Richmond News.

An excerpt:

On my office wall I keep a quote from the great literary theorist Northrop Frye. It reads in part: “…the arts have something to teach beyond themselves, a way of seeing and hearing that nothing else can give, a way of living in society in which the imagination takes its proper central place.

“Just as the sciences show us the physical world of nature, so the arts show us the human world that man is trying to build out of nature. And, without moralizing, the arts gradually lead us to separate the vision of the world we want to live in from the world that we hate and reject…”

I always return to this quote when I feel dispirited about the work I do, as it reminds me of the broader principle and the experiential wealth I have inherited through my exposure to the arts. Arts, culture and heritage are often viewed in terms of the “nice to have, but not essential” category, particularly when it comes to the matter of funding, but as Frye reminds us, the arts have a much more significant and intrinsic meaning that is often overlooked in the bottom-line mentality.

Because the arts engage us on both an emotion and intellectual level, we learn more about ourselves — our motivations, prejudices, assumptions — and through the self-examination it provokes, we learn to take a new view on the world.

Boris Pasternak

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQZFhyKNUbA&feature=related

The conclusion of Pasternak’s translation of King Lear (with English subtitles).  Lear’s “howl” speech begins at the six minute mark.

Today is Boris Pasternak‘s birthday (1890-1960).

Frye cites Pasternak in The Modern Century to distinguish between an ideologically enforced “stupid realism” and a fully liberated “revolutionary realism”:

It seems clear that an officially approved realism cannot carry on the revolutionary tradition of Goya and Daumier.  It is not anti-Communism that makes us feel that the disapproved writers, Daniel and Babel and Pasternak, have most to say to us: on the contrary, it is precisely such writers who best convey the sense of Russians as fellow human beings, caught in the same dilemma that we are.  Revolutionary realism is a questioning, exploring, searching, disturbing force: it cannot go over to established authority and defend the fictions which may be essential to authority, but are never real. (CW 11, 33-4)

Elizabeth Bishop and Nova Scotia

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Great Village school, circa 1910

From an article in The Telegraph:

Nova Scotia is where Bishop discovered her preoccupation with pattern, process and form. Even then she was weighing up aesthetics and arrangements: “The summer before school began was the summer of numbers, chiefly number eight … Four and five were hard enough but I think I was in love with eight.” When she got stuck on “g” she decided with characteristic independence of judgment that “My alphabet made a satisfying short song, and I didn’t want to spoil it.”

The plain and forthright music of her poems comes from another childhood influence: “My Nova Scotian grandmother was a great hymn singer. I grew up with those sounds, and, in fact, still have hundreds of them floating around in my head.”

The hard brightness of the light in Nova Scotia concentrates its colours. The iridescent firs, blazing red barns and luminous bare fields explain why Bishop writes so often of this landscape as if it were painted: “You know about the Bay of Fundy and its tides, I imagine, that go out for a hundred miles or so and then come in with a rise of 80 feet. The soil is all dark terracotta color, and the bay, when it’s in, on a bright day, is a real pink; then the fields are very pale lime greens and yellows and in back of them the fir trees start, dark blue-green. It is the richest, saddest, simplest landscape in the world … ”

You can visit the Elizabeth Bishop Society of Nova Scotia’s centenary blog here .

Palin, Frye and Blood Libel

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPzsklL0hLE

Palin blames “pundints” [sic] for “manufacturing a blood libel” against her

Roy Peter Clark cites Frye on metaphor to make some sense of Palin’s claim to be the victim of “blood libel” after the Tuscon shootings.

A sample:

Frye provides a cautionary lesson about metaphorical language: that the differences between the compared elements are as important as the similarities. If I present myself as a “light to the world,” I am asking my audience to see my divine qualities and will not blame them for observing the dissimilarities.

To describe oneself as a victim of blood libel carries with it a certain responsibility for proportionality, that the seriousness of the metaphor must equate in some measure with the experience being described. While the football game between the Steelers and the Ravens has already been compared to a war – and the players to gladiators – we recognize that as traditional and hyperbolic. But I would not call a failed athletic performance an “abortion” or a blowout of one team by another as a “holocaust” or “a virtual Hiroshima.”